Ted was hustled away to a small side entrance on the ground level of the palace, along a hallway, through a torture chamber where victims shrieked their anguish and hideously painted torturers laughed at their agonies, then down a spiral ramp dimly lighted by small globes of luminous yellow liquid, which appeared almost endless, so deeply did it penetrate the damp rock. Presently, when it seemed to the young scientist that he must be at least a mile beneath the palace, the two men who were dragging him halted at a sharp command from the officer who led the way. The officer then lighted a head lamp on the front of his pagoda-like helmet, and plunged into a dark hole in the wall, followed by the two warriors with their prisoner. They were in a hand-hewn cavern, roughly circular in form. Cut in the wall at irregular intervals were the openings of passageways which led away from the cavern in all directions. The officer led the way into one of these passageways which was filled with a horrible, sickening stench that became stronger as they advanced. Presently the passageway widened, and the cause of the foul odors became apparent, as Ted saw, leaning against the back of a niche cut in the wall at the right, a bloated, festering corpse, chained by the neck to a ring in the wall in such a manner that had the person been living he would neither have been able to stand erect nor lie down. In niches on both sides of the passageway there now came into view more corpses in all stages of decay from cadavers of the freshly dead to mere skeletons. The floors of all the niches were littered with human bones, as was the passageway itself, but the warriors stepped over them or kicked them out of the way without notice. Suddenly, from the gloom ahead, there came a horrible, blood-curdling shriek, followed by peal after peal of demoniac laughter. “Aiee-yah! Ha! Ha! Ha! Aiee-yah! Men and light! Light and life! Darkness and death! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha!” “Shen Ho still lives in body,” whispered one of the soldiers to the other, “but his mind is dead.” “A mighty mind while it lived,” replied the other. “No puny intellect could have given us back the green ray of our ancestors.” “Yet none but a fool would dare oppose P’an-ku, Lord of the Universe,” countered the first. “All wise men are fools in some things,” was the reply. A moment later Ted saw the madman, squatting in his filthy niche and combing his stringy gray beard with bony, clawlike fingers. A few dirty shreds of clothing still clung to his wasted body—clothing which had evidently been made from the richest of materials of the kind worn by great nobles. “Aiee!” he shrieked. “Another victim of the darkness!”